High praise indeed

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Adrienne Jones digs through a centenary history of
Melbourne High School.

Historian and Melbourne High School old boy Dr Alan Gregory
warns at the outset there will be no bone-rattling in Strong like
its Pillars, his epic 716-page centenary history of his old school.
Skeleton-hunters should fossick elsewhere, he suggests, there's
none in this closet.

He concedes that the school has probably had its share of petty
offenders and embezzlers, and a couple of murderers (most
notoriously Hoddle Street killer Julian Knight), but a school
history is no place for "revelling" in them.

The book acknowledges the Hoddle Street link, and reflects
briefly on a few less-than-brilliant teaching careers, but is
mostly about celebrating the right stuff - of the all-round
academic, heroic and humanist kind for which the school is
renowned. It spans 100 years of Victorian education through the
history of this flagship state school and its scholarly armada of
Nobel laureates, Rhodes scholars, physicists, neurosurgeons,
political leaders, military commanders, diplomats, sportsmen,
entrepreneurs, artists, composers, and even a world expert on
lyrebirds.

It's the story of a school that 100 years ago set its own
benchmarks for secondary education, and kept them.

Initially co-educational, Melbourne High was established in the
crumbling ruins of the colonial Old Model School in Spring Street.
The Melbourne Continuation School, ostensibly a teacher-training
school, was in reality the first of the state's high schools,
renamed Melbourne High School seven years later.

It was academically high-achieving with an ethos of its own,
"splendidly and ruthlessly staffed" under founding principal Joseph
Hocking, and headmistress Margery Robertson.

The co-educational school split into a boys' school and a girls'
school (MacRobertson Girls High) in 1927 - the boys' school keeping
its name and site on Forrest Hill, South Yarra.

Dr Gregory tells the story through each principal's reign - eras
on their own but with a common ethos: in the words of its first
principal, to produce "so many upstanding, fearless-eyed
Australians, full of the joy of life, physically fit and with
mind-power and heart-power, duly exercised under favourable
conditions". A cursory review of 1000 names in the book's 75 pages
of notable old boys testifies to the result.

The MHS formula for success is complex. Sometimes vulnerable to
the "tall poppy syndrome" and charges of academic elitism, it is
the nexus the school makes between a liberal education and adding
"something extra" that Dr Gregory believes sets it apart.

"I try to come to grips with all this in the book," he says. "We
don't want to diminish excellence, and we're proud of it, but the
school is not just about academic excellence, it's about a
broad-based education, making young people citizens, participating
in their society and also having a good general education."

He says MHS is proud to be a state school and has much to sing
about - and sing they do.

"The trouble with Melbourne High School boys is that they not
only can't stop talking about their school, but if there is more
than one of them, they suddenly start singing the school song," a
former private-school student told the historian.

Like the high-octane political interest groups and the chess,
science, fencing, drama and aero clubs (to name a few) that have
thrived, singing and music are part of its signature.

As the school's year 11 co-ordinator Fred Kok puts it: "In most
schools you're a nerd if you study the violin and do well in
examinations; at Melbourne High you're a nerd if you don't."

Strong like its Pillars is also about the the teachers and
students who left big imprints.

Centre-stage strides the larrikin ghost of Ben Munday,
charismatic history teacher and football coach whose passionate and
idiosyncratic teaching style both inspired and alienated, leaving a
school shocked when he died suddenly in 1974 in the school foyer,
aged 49.

"The oval and hockey field were covered in cars and the hall
packed to overflowing for his funeral, the police had to come and
conduct the traffic," Dr Gregory recalls.

Also in the legendary category: former student, schoolmaster,
deputy principal and principal (1949-56) Bill Woodfull, who
captained the Australian Test cricket side in the Bodyline series
and twice won the Ashes for Australia. Woodfull cared more about
his reputation as a schoolteacher than his fame as a cricketer.

"One day, after he'd made a rare duck, his maths class wrote a
large '0' on the board. Woodfull entered the room, greeted the
class, turned around, drew two lines through the '0' and said:
'Prove that the two angles are equal'."

Looking forward, Dr Gregory sees the start of a new century as a
time for growth.

"Our high schools have a wonderful history and there should be
more of them that are distinctive. Yes, we want some siblings. They
don't have to be clones (of MHS), but interesting siblings."

And Dr Gregory was wrong about the skeleton. There's a
life-sized one in an upright coffin in the school library.

"Oh, that," he says. "That's art."

The school will hold a centenary symposium on September 20:
Communicate and Educate - the last 100 years and a vision for the
future.